on a Himalaya...

Several days of the 'clapham junctions' wore me and holly out, and the only holiness we saw in Rishikesh was of the porcelain persuasion. Eventually things returned to (relative) normal and we saddled up to head further north still, over the border into Himachal Pradesh. A brutal 11 hour odyssey from the heat of the plains to the cool, hill station of Shimla. To put it bluntly, we had a pretty shitty time pounding out the 250kms, punctuated only with bouts of bike trouble to arrive in a town where inflating hotel prices is the status quo. We reluctantly, treated ourselves to a night of semi-luxury, but made a hasty retreat the next day onward into the mountains.

The roads up here are breathtaking and generally require a strong constitution. Up and down valleys and along ridges 1000s of metres up all to the backdrop of snow capped mountains. This truly is awe inspiringingly, colossal scenery. A stop first at the sleepy, out of season ski-resort(ah-hem) town of Narkanda found us sleeping at over 2500m. Most of the next morning was spent cruising to the bottom of one valley and climbing steeply up another. The Jalori pass was easily the toughest road we've ridden yet. Climbing to over 3200m the bikes, particularly mine, struggles with the steep, unsealed roads. We encountered a pair of worried looking Israelis on a bullet who were performing the ritual of perfunctory checks one carries out every time your bullet skips a beat. Fortunately it was nothing terminal just a lot of weight on a single bike heading up a STEEP road. Once at the top we broke for chai and headed down the other side, spotting snow by the side of the road, riding for twenty minutes or so through pine forest into an Eden of green slopes, waterfalls and terraces. Like a well kept English garden Jihbi appeared to be almost too good to be true. Relatively untouched by mass tourism the 3 or 4 guest houses had but a handful of guests between them. We had no real inclination to leave the next day, or the day after that. Chatting to a local trekking guide and guest house owner we discovered that the valley remains safely omitted from the Lonely Planet at the request of the local community. They have seen only too well how tourism has affected other valleys in Himachal. Similarly the local were at battle with the government, raising an injunction to halt a hydroelectric scheme in the valley. We found genuinely amicable people who really valued their little corner of the earth. And it wasn't hard to see why...